General > General Technical Chat
Laptop Keyboard Tiny Keys
Ranayna:
I have not used a thinkpad in ages, but that FN key placement apparently has traumatized me :p
I would not even think about hitting crtl with my thumb though. I always use my my pinky for left crtl and shift, but i have to admit that i never learned to properly type. My thumbs are always on the spacebar.
But good to know that there is a setting for swapping the keys.
gnuarm:
I think it was two laptops ago when I would rest my thumb on the touch pad buttons working them while moving the index finger as the mouse. Then on a Lenovo they combined the touch pad with the buttons making that impossible to do. I could not get used to using the touch pad with the integrated buttons on top of the palm swipe being unmanageable so I had to turn off the touch pad to even use the durn laptop.
That Lenovo had many, many issues. When it finally succumbed to some illness I just let it go and never looked back. The Dell from eBay is ok, but it is a high end unit, heavy and hot! I actually use it in my lap most of the time so in the winter it's better than a cat, but in the summer I need an asbestos apron, seriously! I actually looked for a lap top cooler that would work in my lap, but never found anything that was worth consideration.
The heat problem might be partly due to dust, but I'm too chicken to start ripping it apart for a cleaning.
Tomorokoshi:
My old one was a Lenovo. It has a very natural feel. I don't get lost, although they did make some keys too small.
My new one is an HP Z Book. They keys are square with no sculpting. They copied the Apple design. No feel, no feedback, very little throw. Very easy to get lost. The Up and Down arrow keys are short and wide, making it very easy to hit the wrong key. No separate PrtSc key; it's activated by a Function combination. Home, Page Up, Page Down, and End are all in a column down the left side. It's very easy to hit one of those by mistake.
Part of what forced all these strange key positions is they added some extra projector and telephone keys for hipsters.
bd139:
--- Quote from: gnuarm on April 23, 2021, 02:34:03 pm ---I think it was two laptops ago when I would rest my thumb on the touch pad buttons working them while moving the index finger as the mouse. Then on a Lenovo they combined the touch pad with the buttons making that impossible to do. I could not get used to using the touch pad with the integrated buttons on top of the palm swipe being unmanageable so I had to turn off the touch pad to even use the durn laptop.
--- End quote ---
Yeah that was the T440 design which sucked. I've got a T440 here on the left and if you look closely you'll see it doesn't have that issue. I replaced the entire touchpad assembly in it with one from a T450 (along with other upgrades). Another joy of thinkpads is they are quite hackable if you want a custom build...
Main thing is that's 7 years of laptops and the design has barely changed into any form of minimalist wankery - they are always the same!
Missing is the Dell 5550 pictured below which has the WORST keyboard on any computer I've ever used. Touchpad is awful too. I hate that machine. It wasn't designed by anyone who actually uses a computer for anything useful.
This spends its entire time docked on a Dell thunderbolt dock with a proper keyboard, mouse and monitor plugged into it so I don't have to touch it or go near it :-DD
SilverSolder:
Everything seems designed by n00bs, for n00bs these days.
We are entering a world where you are not supposed to actually type anything on your computer, in addition to there being so much white space in web layouts that there is almost no information there anyway!
Apparently, we are just meant to sit and admire a perfectly white-pixeled screen, contrasted for styling reasons with the suggestion of a gimped keyboard copied from Apple, and a similarly gimped touch pad the size of a football field with no buttons to distract the aesthetic experience!
Don't tell these losers that the perfectly white screen works great as a reading lamp... or they'll find a way to gimp that too!
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